ZeusMiner Blizzard 1.3Mh/s @ 40W Scrypt Asic Miner [Pictures]
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ZeusMiner Blizzard 1.3Mh/s @ 40W Scrypt Asic Miner –
The ZeusMiner Blizzard is a new asic miner designed to mine scrypt based crypto-currencies. Like other asics, the ZeusMiner Blizzard was created to be a more efficient mining solution over conventional scrypt mining via GPUs.
The ZeusMiner Blizzard is a new scrypt asic miner created by Zeus Integrated Systems Limited. The original design and picture posted on their website showed a grey/silver colored heat sink as shown below:
Zeus Miner Blizzard Grey
Some customers received Blizzards with the grey/silver heat sink while others received asic miners with a black heatsink.
Zeus Miner Blizzard
I ordered from one of the official distributors listed on their website in order to save money on shipping. Since the Zeus Factory is located in China, it would have cost me over $50 USD to ship the scrypt asic miner to my house. However, purchasing from the distributor did not make this shipping time any quicker since the asic miner still came from China, but the distributor buys in bulk and then takes and ships orders locally.
It took a little over a week for the asic miner to arrive and it came with a USB cable and power adapter.
Zeus Miner Blizzard USB
After plugging everything in and running some tests to ensure that the asic miner was working properly, I swapped out the power adapter for a molex plug that I could plug into my power supply to power the asic miner.
Zeus Miner Blizzard DC Barrel Plug
So far, the Blizzard asic miner seems to be averaging about ~1.3Mh/s @ ~45Watts. The screenshot below shows the average hashrate using the modified version of cgminer that was provided by Zeus. There have been reports of other miners being modified to be used as a more stable and effective alternative to cgminer and I will be trying those in the future to see if my results are better.
Zeus Miner Blizzard Hash Rate
Here is the back of the Blizzard asic miner. As you can see, the heatsink is generic and doesn’t have any labels to identify it as the ZeusMiner Blizzard.
Zeus Miner Blizzard Back
Here is the side view of the asic miner which is also blank and doesn’t have any labels either.
Zeus Miner Blizzard Side
So even though the ZeusMiner Blizzard wasn’t exactly as pictured on the website, it did provide the scrypt hashrate that was promised. Unfortunately, it also consumed more power than previously advertised as well. Below is an original picture of the asic miner showing that the original estimate for power consumption was 12W, not 45W.
Zeus Miner Blizzard 12W
The bottom line is that even with the power difference, the ZeusMiner Blizzard is a much more efficient way to mine scrypt based crypto-currencies than by mining via GPU. A quick look at some of the hashing rates that people achieve using currently available GPUs shows that it would cost about $500 USD to buy the GPUs to achieve the equivalent hash rate. Using GPUs would also consume about ~500 Watts of power as well.
Here is a slideshow of pictures of the ZeusMiner Blizzard:
